Nicholas Shanks wrote:
On 23 Mar 2007, at 02:27, Robert Brodrecht wrote:
Just because "most ... doesn't bother" doesn't mean it ought to be
removed.
So let's not ignore elements because "no one uses them."
Ignore them because they are useless.
I was thinking more along the lines of:
1) We start with a set containing all potential authors, human and
robotic, past present and future.
2) We remove from that set the people and programs who don't care about
or are not willing to learn correct methods of authorship, these people
should have no say.
3) We then take a poll of every possible string value for new elements,
and sort the result as a priority list, amalgamating words that mean the
same thing.
4) We decide how many elements HTML should have (i.e. how complicated it
should be/how hard for new people to learn), and cut the list at this
number.
5) We then use this as the new HTML.
That way I'm sure there would be 100 million votes for <copyright> and
perhaps 250,000 votes for <var>, <dfn>, <kbd> etc.
Whilst I agree with your conclusion (drop <var>, <dfn>, <kbd>), I disagree with
your methodology. All possible elements are not equal; some elements can be
processed by general-purpose UAs to beneficial effect, others cannot. When
designing the language we should be looking to include the first type of element
and not the second.
--
"Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?"
-- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
